In the following essay, Deidre McNamer describes Garcia's The Agüero Sisters as a meditation on the juxtaposition of past and present Cuba through the personal lives of the Aguero sisters. McNamer stresses Garcia's ability to highlight the critical elements of "evolution, exile and extinction" within the confines of personal relationships and reflection.

In a certain way, extinction and augury are intertwined. The lineaments of the future can be divined by what the present refuses to support - an idea that is at the heart of The Aguero Sisters, Cristina Garcia's exhilarating meditation on Cubans and Cuba in the early 1990s.

As she did five years ago in her acclaimed first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, Ms. Garcia uses a divided family - some of the members remained in Cuba after the revolution, others made lives in America - as a way to talk about larger issues like...